Direct Cinema

Direct cinema was a term that was used for the first time by the French documentarian Jean Rouch to describe his innovative method of filmmaking in the 1950s – a practice later known as “Cinéma Vérité.”(1) In North America, however, the term had become attached to a different stylistic approach of non-fiction filmmaking, despite the fact that both movements were inspired by the ideas of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The movement emerges in Untied States and Canada (Particularly in Quebec) in the early 1960s as a counter to the contemporary mainstream documentary practice. Direct cinema sought to capture reality as is with little or no intervention from the filmmaker. The illusory rhetoric continuity of the traditional documentary was minimized or even abolished in favor of an uninterrupted and continuous flow of time and space. Direct Cinema deviates stylistically from Cinéma Vérité by its preference for a pure realist depiction of the event over the staged and manipulative montage. It is “a cinema that records directly in the field, not the studio, words and gestures through the use of synchronous camera and tape recorder that is lightweight and flexible to handle...[It is] a cinema that establishes direct contact with people, trying to paste together reality as best as possible while always taking into account that the enterprise is mediated.”(2) Direct cinema is also distinctive in its inclination to the practice of improvisational filmmaking. “The direct cinema documentarist took his Camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the rouch version of Cinéma Vérité tried to precipitate one.” (3) The most recurrent stylistic features of these films includes for example the use of handheld camera, in-location sound recording, and the avoidance of scripted or pre-planned shooting. In addition to Direct Cinema, several other groups were inspired by Dziga Vertov’s practice, most notably the American Newsreel group – a group that shaped its practice on Vertov’s concept of a political collective newsreel. Similarly, its goal was “explicitly propagandist in the sense of publicizing the many political events that 1960s radicals were involved in.”(4)